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Electronic Aiding of Stringed Instrument Sound

Comment on Electronic Aiding of Stringed Instrument Sound

by R.W. Burhans

Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Data Sheet #10, 1975



Introduction

In perspective we should view modern sound reproduction as an “Electronic Art” which requires somewhat different types of skills than the “Mechanical Art” developed by the Luthier. The same type of careful attention to detail are required in both and there is no substitute for long hours at the workbench with a lot of reading of the literature published in periodicals like: Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics, Rolling Stone, Guitar Player, Electronotes Newsletter, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, and even Scientific American. There is even a trade quarterly circulated to music shops, Musical Product News and Musical Electronics, which is a sales promotion and product announcement type with information on the myread of stuff on the current market. Still others are dB the sound studio engineers magazine, a magazine called Audio, and another DB, Down Beat.

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Gimme Back My Minutes

Gimme Back My Minutes

by Rick Turner

previously published in American Lutherie #26, 1991 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume Three, 2004



I’d like to share a couple of things with those in the repair business: how I handle the financial end of repair work, and what I’m trying to do to gain back some of the eight to ten hours a week I currently lose talking to customers.

I do repair work for Westwood Music in Los Angeles, working as an independent contractor. I set my own hours, use my own tools, pay for my own worker’s compensation insurance, and establish the prices for the repair work. There is one other part-time repairman, David Neely, and he works the same way I do. Prices for repair work are set for each job either by direct quote from our price list or an estimate of time at $50 per hour. On big jobs or for building custom Strats from generic parts I drop the hourly to $45; I figure there’s less time wasted talking on bigger jobs. Our store sales people sometimes take in the work (the more of that the better), and they might make a ballpark estimate. We in the shop usually call the customer to give a closer price and/or suggest additional needed work.

When the job is complete, I fill out a four-part sequentially-numbered store invoice which includes labor, retail-parts cost (at the net-to-musician price — we figure any applicable discounts), sales tax, and the invoice total. I keep a copy which I use to bill the store, and the second copy goes on a clipboard in sequential order. The instrument, along with the two remaining copies, is put in the front of the store in the “to be picked up” pile. When the customer picks up the instrument, he or she gets a copy, and the remaining copy is filed with the store’s daily receipts.

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Review: Getting a Bigger Sound: Pickups and Microphones for Your Musical Instrument by Bart Hopkin with Robert Cain and Jason Lollar

Review: Getting a Bigger Sound: Pickups and Microphones for Your Musical Instrument by Bart Hopkin with Robert Cain and Jason Lollar

Reviewed by Fred Carlson

Originally published in American Lutherie #74, 2003 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015



Getting a Bigger Sound: Pickups and Microphones for Your Musical Instrument
Bart Hopkin with Robert Cain and Jason Lollar
ISBN 0-9727313-0-X
Nicasio, CA: Experimental Musical Instruments, 104 pp., 2002
www.windworld.com

I know I’m not the only electronically challenged luthier who’s been waiting for someone to write an understandable, useful handbook on pickups, microphones, and instrument amplification. I’d been envisioning the author to be lutherie renaissance-man Rick Turner, who wrote the fine “Electronic Answer Man” columns for American Lutherie in years past. I know how busy Rick is, but I remain ever-hopeful that pressure from the lutherie community will drive him to it someday. In the meantime, another of my musical instrument heroes has come out with his take on such a manual, and I’m happy to say it goes a long way toward filling the void in useful introductions to this subject.

Bart Hopkins’ take on the adventure of electronically amplifying a musical instrument is undoubtedly coming from a different perspective than one from which a more guitar-oriented writer like Rick Turner would approach it. Bart has spent many years spearheading Experimental Musical Instruments, an organization devoted to interesting and unusual musical instruments of all sorts. For many years, EMI published a journal of the same name that featured all sorts of amazing stuff from the wonderful, quirky, experimental underside of instrument building. Bart did writing and illustrating for the journal as well as editing and publishing duties. He’s also an active guitarist and creative instrument builder/inventor with experience and interests covering a broad spectrum of the music world. Since EMI’s journal ceased publication in 1999, Bart has kept the organization alive as a source of back issues. EMI also offers recordings of many of the wild and wonderful creations featured in the journals’ pages, as well as several books Bart has written on instrument design and building. Recently the EMI catalog has added pickups and pickup components and materials to its stable of offerings.

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Review: Installing Transducer Pickup Systems by Dan Erlewine

Review: Installing Transducer Pickup Systems by Dan Erlewine

Reviewed by John Calkin

Originally published in American Lutherie #65, 2001 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six, 2013



Video: Installing Transducer Pickup Systems
Dan Erlewine
Stewart-MacDonald, 1999

The music stores for which I used to do guitar repairs used to sell transducers at a hefty discount, then charge a flat $25 installation fee. Their normal hourly rate was $33. It’s easy to put in a transducer in an hour or less. Making it function properly is another matter, and many of those guitars came back for adjustments that would never have been necessary had the time been granted to do the job right in the first place.

This video is about doing the job right the first time. The guitar top is precisely jacked up to simulate string tension, the saddle slot is routed accurately and with a flat bottom, a new saddle is made, and adjustments are made to the bridge to correct the string angle as it comes off the saddle.

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Product Reviews: Acoustech Dynamic Field Pickup

Product Reviews: Acoustech Dynamic Field Pickup

by Harry Fleishman

Originally published in American Lutherie #29, 1992 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Three, 2004



Acoustech Dynamic Field Pickup
Acoustech
Orangeburg, NY

My first attempt at guitar amplification was an early ’60s DeArmond pickup on my f-hole Gibson acoustic. It attached with little difficulty or damage and sounded great to me at the time. That was 1962 and my expectations were not terribly high. I plugged straight into a portable Wollensak tape recorder and used it as an amp until I got a used Gibson Falcon as a Christmas gift. A few years later, I installed a roundhole DeArmond in my Gibson J-45. Again, it sounded pretty good, all things considered. But all the things I considered didn’t amount to much. What choices did I really have, after all?

Those little contact mikes, which stuck on the face of a guitar, weren’t very good; I learned that soon enough. And the good-sounding microphones were expensive, unwieldy, and restricting. Like many guitarists, I wanted the freedom of movement that a pickup could give. When the first piezo transducer came out, I stuck one on and boogied. By that time, however, I was more sophisticated, more discerning, more caught up in the folk boom, and wanting a pickup that sounded like an acoustic guitar, only louder. The first I tried was the Barcus-Berry. Not too bad if you didn’t mind sounding like you were inside a bucket. The similar piezos weren’t much better. The Hot Dot sounded great to me when it came out. Like many technological improvements, its refinements masked its shortcomings for a while. I probably installed a hundred of them while continuing my search for a better sounding, easier installing pickup for myself and the customers I was attracting to my repair and building business.

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